Dr. Ben Carson’s address to CPAC 2013 included his thoughts about how, if he were an enemy of America, he would set about destroying her. His plan had four points:
1. Create division among the people.
2. Encourage a culture of ridicule for basic moral principles.
3. Undermine the nation’s financial stability with crushing government debt.
4. Weaken the morale and funding of the military.
“It appears, coincidentally, that those are the very things happening right now,” Carson noted ruefully, although he went on to say it would be a mistake to pin this entirely on Barack Obama, or any other individual.
Those four points are very intriguing, as are the order Carson listed them in. He could write a book expanding on this; perhaps he plans to. I’ve long thought there’s nothing more divisive than the modern liberal potion of class warfare, multiculturalism, invasive “progressive” tax system, and victim/entitlement mythology. Short of outright tribal warfare, there’s nothing more divisive than telling some people they have rightful first claim on the labor and property of others. Everything the Left does is oriented toward inflating the sense of entitlement and/or helplessness on the part of the Takers, or making the Makers feel ashamed of resisting these demands. And, of course, obscuring the true identities of the Takers and Makers, who tend to blur together at right about the point where the “middle class” begins.
The intense illusion that much of the government’s largess is “free” is also deeply divisive, because it carries the implication that only cruelty and sadism could explain anyone’s reluctance to authorize it. This is a common refrain in modern socialist politics – those who insist on fiscal sanity are portrayed as irrational at best, if not callous beasts who enjoy the suffering of the poor.
It’s interesting to watch liberals stubbornly refuse to concede that anything else could possibly motivate them. I can easily think of both sincere and ulterior motives for Big Government liberalism: the belief that government welfare is vital for the survival of the poor (and increasingly, the middle class) versus the simple self-interested greed of politicians who derive great power, and personal profit, from the welfare state. But you never hear the other side talk about the sincere reasons why guys like Paul Ryan are waving those doomsday financial projections around. And why are so many of them eager to pass reforms that would leave them with less power, less money to spend? (Of course, that thought occurs quite clearly to the Republican-In-Name-Only types who aren’t so eager to jump on the small-government bandwagon.)
The result is a bitterly divisive political environment… and that’s just Step 1 on Carson’s proposed doomsday agenda. Then you get into Step 2, the “culture of ridicule for basic morality” – which, I would submit, is the key component in keeping the American people from asking the questions that would disable the manufacture of division, and shut the whole diseased system down before it could proceed to the creation of those crushing national debts. The ridicule of basic morality greases the slide down into that welfare safety net – not just for poor people, but for middle-class entitlement junkies and corporate welfare millionaires. It turns self-respect into a joke, instead of a priceless treasure. It sounds like Ben Carson (and by all accounts his mother) refused to part with that treasure, under any circumstances.